CONCEPT
Representational Ecology
The study of how the representational environments in which humans operate shape the spatial models they develop — a natural extension of attentional ecology into the structural dimension of cognition.
An environment dominated by spreadsheets produces spreadsheet-shaped thinkers. An environment of flowcharts produces flowchart-shaped thinkers. An environment of natural language interfaces produces thinkers whose spatial models are shaped by what language naturally encodes: narrative, metaphor, sequence. Representational ecology studies these effects at the population level, asking what kinds of cognition a given representational environment cultivates, what kinds it suppresses, and what the long-run cognitive consequences of a society-wide shift in representational tools might be.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework extends You On AI's attentional ecology into a second dimension. Attentional ecology asks what a saturated information environment does to the capacity for sustained attention. Representational ecology asks what it does to the structure of thought itself — which spatial models become easy to construct, which become difficult, which become unthinkable.
The historical precedent is instructive. The spread of print culture restructured European cognition toward linear, sequential, argumentative thinking; the spread of databases and spreadsheets restructured twentieth-century cognition toward tabular, relational